Recently, portable information terminals (e.g., cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDA)) provided with a touch panel as a control device are available on the market. Touch panels allow intuitive user operations. Therefore, it is expected that a growing number of portable information terminals provided with a touch panel will be available. The user viewing web contents using a portable information terminal like this will designate a hyperlink displayed in the screen, using a finger or a touch pen (stylus) especially provided for the terminal.
Since the screen size of a portable information terminal is small, however, it could be extremely difficult to select a hyperlink where they are close together. For example, the end of the finger pressing the touch panel may extend over multiple links with the result that an undesired link may be selected. The user may use a stylus having an end narrower than the finger. As the available screen gets smaller, however, the user will experience difficulty with aligning the end with a desired position, resulting in the link being selected by mistake. The difficulty will be particularly acute when the user reads a page designed for a PC instead of a cell phone.
Technologies are devised to prevent hyperlinks from being close together in order to reduce the likelihood of a link being selected by mistake. For example, patent document No. 1 discloses a technology for drafting a document in which the position of display of a hyperlink in a document file is changed by inserting a blank around the hyperlink. Further, patent document No. 2 discloses a method of reformatting a web page by inserting HTML tags or by using a cascade style sheet, when the hyperlinks in the web page are close together.    [patent document No. 1] JP 2004-118484    [patent document No. 2] JP 2004-525452